"We need to talk up strong about our Aboriginal languages and the role that it does play within our communities, whether you're in Redfern or remote South Australia," says Aboriginal language worker Karina Lester.

The University of Sydney's Jakelin Troy, whose research has led to a revival in the Sydney Language, also known as Gadigal, says we "lose a little bit of our humanity" every time an Indigenous language stops being spoken.

"The indigenous languages of the world are the one that are most under threat and are least valued," says Professor Troy.

"All languages can be woken up again — but it takes a lot of effort."

The power to change lives

If you imagine that language is simply a communication system, rather than an entire way of seeing the world, then languages other than your own might seem extraneous.

Yet monolingualism is not the global norm — not even in some linguistically diverse Aboriginal communities, where English is just one of several languages spoken.

Reclaiming languages that have been denied and suppressed by violence or the threat of it goes to the heart of Aboriginal people's sense of cultural identity.

And language revival has the power to change people's lives.

"Language revitalisation is a very culturally rich contemporary practice," according to Carmel O'Shannessy, a former associate professor in linguistics at the University of Michigan and now the Australian National University.

"It brings a lot of health and wellbeing, it helps feel a much stronger sense of who they are, their heritage and their identity.

"And they're able to bring this increased wellbeing into their everyday contemporary life."

Knowledge locked into language

As much as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are in the landscape, marking physical and geographical features such as Uluru or Purnululu, they also describe the human experience of interaction and a deep compatibility with the natural environment.

"There is so much knowledge locked into every language," says Professor Troy, who reclaimed her Ngarigu clan name — Namitj — during a speech at a conference.

Uttering just a few words in Ngarigu — the language of the high country and the Snowy Mountains — had a profound effect.

"It's funny. I keep thinking I'm over it, but it has an absolutely fundamental impact on my body and soul," she says.

Professor Troy undertook forensic research in the 1990s into the notebooks left by a naval officer from the First Fleet flagship HMS Sirius, William Dawes, from his interactions with the Gadigal people of Sydney Harbour between 1790 and 1791.

Dawes' notebooks, based largely on his interviews with a young woman named Patyegarang, were rediscovered in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1972, and their linguistic secrets were unlocked for the first time.

"I had a great empathy for the language," says Professor Troy, who grew up in Sydney but spent some of her early childhood on the road travelling across Australia with her family, hearing Aboriginal people speaking different languages.

"I can remember being quite fascinated as a young child because some it sounded a bit like English but it wasn't. And then as I got older I wondered why it was that we couldn't speak our own language — and that became a real concern for me."

The challenges of creolisation

Ms Lester is a director of the board of First Languages, the national body set up to support communities in the maintenance and reclamation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, and works in a specialist unit at the University of Adelaide.

She is also an Anangu translator, and a fluent speaker of Yankunytjatjara language.

She says there is a need to devise new words in Yankunytjatjara, but those decisions must be made by communities of speakers.

"We really need to sit down and work as a group on identifying what is, then, the Pitjantjatjara-Yankunytjatjara term for Facebook or an iPad."

New languages emerge

Carmel O'Shannessy, a linguist from the Australian National University, has been documenting the emergence of a new language in the community of Lajamanu on the edge of the Tanami Desert, south-west of Katherine.

Since 1998, she has been tracking the evolution of Light Warlpiri, now the primary way of speaking among people under 40 in Lajamanu.

"We can actually learn a lot [from the emergence of Light Warlpiri]," she says.

"Even though for the speakers of the traditional languages to see the loss is, of course, sad, at the same time we can see something being renewed or created."

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